12 billion videos served up online during May, says comScore

US Internet users watched some 12 billion videos online in May of 2008, …

Online video is catching on among the masses, and in a big way. Viewers in the US watched 12 billion videos this past May, according to data from comScore, a 45 percent increase from a year prior. comScore's data shows healthy growth in online video viewing, not just from user-generated video sites, but those that provide streaming TV shows as well.

Almost 142 million unique users watched video in May, which comScore says is a whopping 74 percent of the total US Internet audience. Users watched an average of 85.3 videos per person during those 31 days for an average of 228 minutes of video. Unsurprisingly, the most popular online video property was "Google Sites"—that is, sites owned by Google like YouTube and Google Video, which made up 35 percent of all videos viewed during that time period. comScore says that 4.2 billion videos from YouTube were viewed in May and made up over 98 percent of the videos viewed from Google's properties.

Second in the list of popular properties was Fox Interactive Media, owners of MySpace and the ever-popular MySpace Video, which hosted 6.4 percent of all videos viewed in May. Yahoo! sites, Microsoft sites, and Viacom Digital came in third, fourth, and fifth with relatively small percentages (between 1.7 and 2.9 percent). NBC and Fox's joint venture to serve up full episodes of current and classic TV content, Hulu, came in 10th place and served up 0.7 percent of the videos viewed. That's still nothing to sneeze at, though, as comScore says that 0.7 percent translated to 88 million videos.

In many ways, the news isn't surprising at all. 2007 and 2008 have been the Year(s) of Online Video, seeing an explosion of new sites while the old ones continue to gain viewership. And, although certain sites may attract a different demographic than others (Nielsen Online recently found that men tend to prefer user-generated video sites while women prefer streaming TV sites), it certainly appears as if demand is big enough to accommodate most of them. Hulu is even utilizing the popularity of more well-known sites (namely YouTube) in order to seed clips from its shows and attract users to watch the full episodes.

Still, even with the proliferation of online video, and the increasing availability of full-length TV shows and movies, there's still room for physical media sales. Home Media Magazine recently found that DVD sales were still growing and that online offerings (from both illicit P2P to legit video sites) weren't making a serious dent. Online video will continue to grow, however, and more and more content is becoming available digitally through legit outlets like Hulu and Netflix.